Pearl Harbor - An AU
by The-Dixon-Addiction
Summary: Rick Grimes and Daryl Dixon grew up in the army like brothers in Georgia. Now they're daring young pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Rick has fallen in love with Beth Green, a beautiful U.S. Navy nurse. But when the sounds of war rumble on the horizon, Rick decides he must leave his new love and his best friend to join Europe's fight. Rated T for now, may move up later.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: Hello everyone! As you can tell, I am somewhat new to this site. I have been an avid reader for years, but never really got a chance to write. Inspiration hit me hard when I was reading the book based on the Pearl Harbor movie and I had to just go ahead and try my hand at this. I will be changing a few things here or there in order for it to fit with our characters. I do not own Pearl Harbor by Randall Wallace or The Walking Dead or its characters. Leave me some feedback and let me know if you think I should go ahead and continue with it or not.**

Daryl Dixon could still smell the sweet scent of the pine wood where Rick Grimes had bored two holes through the nail keg and run a rope between them, to tie around their waists like a seat belt. The two boys sat on that keg, its top barely bigger than a slop bucket but large enough for the narrow butts of two ten-year-olds living on the farm scraps of America's Great Depression.

But they had their own airplane.

It was a biplane, one of the first crop dusters anywhere in the south. Rick's father had bought it after the spine of its fuselage had cracked and its engine was thought to be too worn to be much use to anybody. He had cannibalized it for spare parts. Now its wings were jagged stumps of splintered wood, ripped fabric, and rusted wire; its propeller was a 2-by-4 Rick found on the farm, and its windshield sheltered a sparrow's nest. But it had once flown in the Georgia air, and now it flew farther and faster than any airship had ever flown, in the minds of two farm boys.

"They're coming in from the left!" Rick screamed, and threw his shoulder against Daryl. Rick had lean ropey arms, a tall frame and the quick eyes of a pilot. Even at the age of ten, Daryl had noticed this quality of his friend's eyes: not nervous, not twitchy, just quick.

"I see 'em!" Daryl called back, above the imaginary roar of their plane's engine, and the buzz Rick was making with his lips as he jerked the broken broomstick that controlled the maneuvers he was making through the sky in his mind.

"Get 'em Daryl!"

"I got 'em, Rick!" And his tongue tickled his teeth, unleashing a thrashing pulse of machine gun fire. Daryl loved it when Rick call him by name, called to him like a brother. Rick was the only one in life who called him Daryl. His mother had called him by it, but she had died when Daryl was four. The best thing his father ever called him was Boy. Daryl's hair was light brown, like his mother's had been, and he had her blue eyes. At least he hoped his eyes had come from her. An image of the softness of her eyes as she once looked at him, gazing at him in quiet love, blazed in his memory whenever he thought of her. But her life seemed so distant now, and he had begun to wonder if his memories were only the projections of his fantasies and he saw her as Rick saw their plane, soaring in the sky.

"He's behind us! Behind us! See him?!"

"I see him, Rick!" Daryl hollered, and twisted in his seat to fire toward the ruptured tail section of their craft. But in the plowed fields beyond, though they glowed for him in the pure joy of togetherness. Rick, he was sure, could see the Red Baron's bi-plane arcing down toward them. Rick could see everything, could really see anything he could imagine. It was the most remarkable thing about being with Rick. With Rick, there was the world everyone else could see, and then there was the world that he could see, a world where old wrecks flew, and boys were pilots, and they were brave.

The only thing Rick couldn't see was how to spell words. On the plank dashboard he'd rigged up for the planes controls, he'd chalked the letters RUDR. Daryl, winner of the King County Elementary School spelling bee the last three years running, had never been able to hear a word spoken without seeing exactly how to spell it in his mind. And Daryl didn't just see words, he heard them sing and play with each other, he heard them rhyme or clash as they bounced around in his head. Still, Daryl would have traded all his visionary gifts for Rick's. In games like dodge ball, Rick saw the ball's flight before anyone else—where it was heading; it was almost as if he could look into the future of the flight of a ricocheting ball. This made Rick the better athlete, when it came to things like batting or catching; and he has speed too, in his legs and hands as well as his eyes. Daryl's big advantage on the playground was that he could fight. When he got punched in the nose, he never cried; he hit back, and always harder than he was hit. It was because of this that their friendship was sealed.

It happened one cold November, when the sky was slate gray and the mood of their teacher was just as dark. She'd given them the assignment of writing a page about the meaning of Thanksgiving, and had then told the students to exchange papers with the classmate sitting next to them. It was a routine of hers: "Check each other's spellin'!" she'd call out, and the pages would rustle across the aisles. Daryl had always sat beside Rick; they would draw pictures of World War I air battles, and whisper, and snicker, and it was that very noise that had gotten them separated. So now it was Shane Walsh sitting beside Rick, and when Daryl saw the papers exchange, he already felt the cold in his stomach.

Daryl made his new deskmate's corrections quickly-there was only one mispunctuation, and Daryl picked it up instantly—then looked in sick fear at Rick's face. Rick had no idea what was wrong or right with Shane's paper—but that was not the danger. Shane frowned down at Rick's paper, then smiled, and began drawing circles around words with his red crayon, and then before Daryl or anyone could do anything about it, Shane held the paper up high and laughed and called to the class, "Lookey here at how smart Rick is!" The paper was covered in red—but it was not as red as the humiliation on Rick's face. The teacher had said sharply, "Give that paper back to Rick, Shane!" and she left it at that.

But Daryl hadn't. At recess he raced out of the schoolhouse door, ran like a bullet at Shane, slammed his forehead into Shane's nose, then fell across his chest and punched him until they pulled him off, though Daryl broke away twice to punch and kick him again.

That fight had marked Daryl's public life in a way nothing had before. He and Rick were more than friends; they were brothers.

The boys paused in their game as the sounds of the real plane above them changed, growing louder and higher in pitch as the plane descended over a field lush with young plants. In the cockpit was Rick's father, a Baptist deacon who raised his own crops, fixed anything devised by man, and turned other people's junk into useful machinery.. The plane he was diving earthward in at that very moment was a crop-duster he had assembled from parts culled from a dump outside a nearby military base, combined with those he had stripped from the wreck Rick and Daryl played in. He had painted the plane a ruby red, and its wings and spinning propeller flashed sunlight as it rushed a few feet about the plowed ground, released a trail of crop spray and climbed again, up into a crystalline blue sky.

Daryl watched and thought how beautiful it was. _Like Heaven_ were the words that came into his mind. Then for some reason he did not yet understand, _Volunteer State_ sang after them. It would be years before he would write the line, in describing his home: "…Maybe it's not Heaven; it's just Georgia. But for as long as there's been an America, men have fought and died for this place—as volunteers." Then he would comprehend where the urge to express himself on paper had come from; now he looked at life, and peace, and felt its joy.

Rick pressed beside him on the same nail keg seat, watched the plane dip again, release a blossoming trail of soft spray, then pop higher as his father pushed the foot control and the elevator flaps on the tail section bit the air, and Rick felt it. Rick felt everything. To Rick Grimes, the world was an endless source of living stimulus, and he lived connected to it through the sensations of his heart. Movement, sound, sight, smell, all affected his emotions.

He was not thought of as an emotional boy; feeling early on- -Rick's way of knowing—that most people did not experience life as vividly as he did, he learned to keep his intensity to himself, Most people thought of him as quiet and inward. But to those with whom Rick felt a real kinship—the ones whose spirit had a glow, a scent like fresh bread, a taste like cool spring water—Rick was a volcano of life.

Rick's heart locked onto those people, and stayed.

He knew he and Daryl would be friends for life. Their differences, like Daryl's abilities with words, were not barriers; Rick saw beyond the fact that written words made sense to Daryl and were so confusing to him. And Daryl was always ready to enter the world of imagination that two Georgia boys could find on a spring day.

"Bandits at 2 o'clock!" Rick yelled.

"Power dive!" Daryl responded. And together they buzzed their lips in a flying noise and worked the controls, Rick's bare feet on one pedal, Daryl's on the other. The barn beside them, unpainted except for the hand lettering that said "Grimes Crop dusting," remain firmly in its place, so the boys had to stare at the control cages chalked on their makeshift dashboard to see the world spin and dip around them. In their minds their overalls had become flight jackets, and their bowl cut hair was covered with leather helmets, the very gear for wearing when saving America from the aggression of the German Kaiser. Daryl held his fists in front of his face and spat machine gun sounds, then blew an explosion through his cheeks.

"Good shooting, Daryl!"

"Good flying, Rick!"

"Land of the free…" Rick said, in holy conviction.

"Home of the brave," Daryl returned, as if he said amen.

But before they could turn their dreams to confront another challenge against the safety of democracy, a man's hand closed around the straps of Daryl's overalls and snatched him from the cockpit.

Surprised as Daryl was, he knew it before he saw: it was his father's hand, strong, battered, dirty, the way the hand of a man with but a single arm so quickly becomes. Will Dixon, Daryl's daddy, was a veteran of World War I, and had left one of his arms in the Argonne Forest and had brought back lungs scorched with mustard gas, so he was not a man inclined to be sensitive to the concerns of those whose bodies were whole. He dropped Daryl onto his feet, and let him go, just long enough to snatch him by the front of his shirt, lifting him half off his feet again, and shaking him. "You no count, boy! Horvath come lookin', said he'd pay a dime for you to shovel his pig shed, and I can't find you no place. I done told you, you spend time with this stupid boy can't even read, you ain't never gonna amount to nothin'!"

With all the shame and fear that burned in Daryl at the moment, what came from his mouth was, "He's not stupid, Da—"

Before he could finish the word _Daddy_ , his father had slapped him off his feet.

Rick, who had been smacked on the bottom by his father's hand and had even been switched once for having let his father hear him swear, but had never seen a grown man slap a child in the face, much less hit him so hard as to knock him to the ground, was so horrified he couldn't get a sound out. Daryl was not even surprised. But when his father snatched him up again, twisting the overall straps so tight they choked him, Daryl struggled. It did no good; his father began marching across the plowed field, dragging Daryl as he went.

"Da—" Daryl gasped. "Daddy—"

But Will Dixon's fury made him blind to what he was doing—until something hard cracked across his back with such force that his arm went limp and he fell with his face between the furrows. He'd been hit at the top of the spine, where the neck and shoulders meet in the back, and the impact had caused his mind to flash white for a moment, and then go black. The world swayed like a porch swing, and then Dixon pitched over, turning belly up, and his eyes found what had hit him. The 2-by-4 propeller, in the hands of Rick Grimes.

Rick held the board like a baseball bat, cocked, ready to swing again. "Let him alone!" Rick shouted.

Dixon's eyes bulged in rage; he staggered to his feet. And Daryl was screaming, "Rick… Daddy… No!"

Daryl's father had not shaved since the last time Daryl had seen him, which was three days before. There were scratches on his face, the blood dried over, like he'd stumbled into a barbed wire fence sometime during his absence. His eyes were bloodshot, he stank of vomit, and he looked murderous. None of that scared Rick, if he really saw it at all. All Rick really seemed aware of at the moment was Daryl's vulnerability, and the plank in his own hand. Rick drew the plank back further and hissed, like an oath, "I'll bust you open, you… German!"

The words rang something deep in Will Dixon's broken brain. He froze. He blinked like a calf. And then he began to cough, in sick ugly convulsions, an old soldier broken by trench warfare, stress, cigarettes, and booze—ruined lungs and a ruined life. He finally gasped enough breath to choke out, "I fought the Germans."

His eyes found his son, and it registered in them what he had just done. His mouth moved a moment, then formed words. "Daryl, I…"

The words ran out on him. He turned and staggered away. Daryl looked at Rick with a communication deeper than blood, then ran off after his father. "Daddy! Daddy! Wait."

Daryl caught up with him, took his father's hand, and walked away with him, gripping his fingers in forgiveness. Behind Rick, Tommy Grimes rolled his plane to a stop and shut down the engine. Rick heard the silence more than he had heard the motor's sound, and only then glanced back, to see his father frowning at Daryl and Will Dixon, receding across his field. "What's goin' on, son?" Rick's dad asked.

"Nothing," Rick answered. "Daryl's dad just come to get him." Rick turned his back to the ramshackle plane and replaced the 2x4 propeller. But his daddy was still looking toward Daryl and his father, walking away. After a moment, Tommy spoke. "Hey boy," he said, "you wanna go up?"

Rick's eyes lightened in delight, and he ran to the place, hopping up on the wing and scrambling into his father's lap. "Hey Daddy," he said, as his father reclipped the seatbelt around them both, "will you take Daryl up sometime?"

"Sure will, son."

As his father restarted the hot engine and pressed it forward in a rolling turn, Rick looked out toward Daryl's back as he walked away, and Rick understood with absolute clarity that for as long as Rick lived, nothing would ever hurt Daryl Dixon unless it went through Rick first.


	2. Chapter 2

Twelve years later, over a U.S. Army airfield in New Jersey, a squadron of planes sand in unison through the sky. Rick was in the lead plane, and Daryl flew the plane just off his right wing. They were fighter planes, but America was not at war. It was January 1941.

The world had changed a great deal in those twelve years, though most of those changes seemed to have taken place across the seas. A man named Adolf Hitler had taken control of Germany, and many people around the world, including the great American aviator, Charles Lindbergh, looked across the Atlantic and saw the changes as good. Hitler reorganized his country after the chaos of the Great War, the War to End All Wars as the newspaper had called it, and now Germany was full of energy and motivation. Some people—a majority in non-German Europe, a minority in America—found themselves troubled about where those motivations were aimed, especially as Hitler raised great armies, and launched the production of massive supplies of new weapons.

Hitler was not the only one to do so. Across the Pacific, as far from America as it was possible to get on the surface of the planet Earth, the Japanese had begun building their own empire, encroaching on their neighbors.

Instead of opposing the efforts of these nations to build up their ability to make war, America had, in general, assisted them. Japan could not function without oil, and the Unites States remained its prime supplier. For years, Japan had bought every piece of scrap metal it could find, and again America, hungry for cash in the years of the Great Depression, had been its best source. In rural communities, one of the simplest methods of raising spending money was to collect the discarded pieces of broken equipment that seemed to be lying around every farm and haul them to scrap yards in town, where somebody was always ready to buy.

Rick and Daryl had even gone into that business themselves for a while. They had stopped it after the day they'd returned to Rick's family's farm, where Daryl now lived too, and had shown Rick's grandfather, rocking on the front porch, the hard money they'd just received. His grandfather had sat in silence, listening to them exult with the success of their private enterprise and the plans of what they might buy, having the first discretionary money of their lives; finally Grandpa Grimes spit a long stream of tobacco juice and said, "Boys, when they start turning that metal into shrapnel and them plow tips start whistlin' by your ears, you ain't gonna be so happy you made that money."

Daryl's father, dead now, had lost his arm to shrapnel, and after Grandpa Grimes's comments, the boys knew they'd either have to find another way to make spending money or do without it, and since there was no other way, they did without it.

But only for a while. They found something else that paid them, something they loved so much, they would have paid to do it: crop-dusting. With the help of Rick's father, they scavenged an entire set of parts and built a second plane for the family business, and the only fights they ever had were over whose turn it was to fly.

Then they discovered the United States Army Air Corps, and life took on a new significance. Now it was Lieutenant Rick Grimes and Lieutenant Daryl Dixon in the cockpits of two planes at the head of a squadron cutting through the sky over the New Jersey airbase, as the Training Captain radioed instructions from the ground: "Grimes, Dixon, loosen up that formation!"

"You said tighten up," Grimes's voice came back to him, and even over the tinniness of the radio, it had its distinctive quality; when Grimes was in the air, he always sounded like he was laughing. "Didn't he say tighten up, Daryl?"

"He said tighten up," Dixon's voice, and the Training Captain would've sworn the tips of their two planes, already a yard apart, moved to within a foot of each other.

"Not that tight!" the Training Captain barked. He loved those two guys; there was nothing like the brimming confidence in a pilot, as long as he could back it up with skill, and these two Georgia boys had shown up on the first day of Cadet School with as much flying skill and far more natural potential than any of the instructors who were supposed to be teaching them. If the Army Air Corps had been training more young pilots, and there weren't too many older ones with nothing else to do, the runny nosed hotshots would've been instructors themselves. The Training Captain had rank, but on an air base for fighter pilots, nothing gives a man more power than his courage and skill, especially if it's a base run by Colonel Jimmy Doolittle. Still, the T.C. liked the two young bucks. Cocky as they were, they retained the inherent politeness of Georgia boys.

Grimes, in the point plane, led the squadron in a fast turn, and the T.C. watched the maneuver in admiration, the eight other pilots in the group following with more skill and assurance than ever. It was as if Grimes and Dixon cut grooves through the air for them, trailing excitement in their wake, and the other guys sucked it into their intakes and poured it out through their own exhaust manifolds. "That'll do," the Training Captain radioed, "let's bring 'em in."

The P-40's, the Army Air Corps' best fighters, began landing in tight order. They taxied off the runway right beside where the Training Captain stood, shut down their engines, slid back their canopies with flourish, and hopped out, full of life and adrenaline. _If I had half their energy,_ the T.S. thought, _I'd own half the world._ Then he noticed the planes had stopped landing, but they were two P-40's short. He didn't have to check off faces to know which two they were. "Where are Grimes and Dixon?" he asked.

Then he saw the two planes in the air; they'd circled to opposite ends of the airfield and were now headed directly at each other, like two bullets playing chicken.

"Aw no…" the Training Captain muttered, as all the young pilots looked skyward.

From inside the cockpits, where Rick and Daryl steadily pressed the throttles forward and felt the steady surge in speed and watched the two planes closing on each other at double the rate either plane could fly, the rushing excitement was awesome.

The pilots on the ground watched speechlessly as the P-40's hurtled at each other. Glenn William Rhee, nicknamed Billy the Kid because he was the most boyish-faced of the pilots, looked in rising panic at his best friends; as the planes drew so close they couldn't possibly get out of each other's way, Glenn screamed to drown out the sound of the collision.

Twenty feet above their heads, the planes came together, and at the last instant—when it seemed to onlookers that the planes had already hit—the two P-40's each snapped a quarter turn so that their wings were vertical, and shot past each other belly to belly. The wind blasted the clothes of the men on the ground, blew their hats from their heads, as if they stood in the vortex of a passing hurricane.

In the cockpits, Rick and Daryl exploded in laughter, their planes racing away from each other as fast as they'd closed, their hearts sharing the same trill, the timeless pleasure of living totally in the present. Daryl accepted the moment in silent serenity, letting the plane soar on its own, rising like a still hawk on the wind; Rick celebrated his own enjoyment by spinning his plane like a corkscrew before jerking his stick straight up, as if to punch through the gravity of the earth and sail unfettered toward the stars. On the ground, the other pilots laughed and congratulated each other, as if they too were in the cockpits.

The Training Captain let his cap land on the ground near his feet before he said anything. Then all he could mutter was, "Dammit! Those guys are a menace to national security."

Martinez, a slender Mexican from a Brooklynn neighborhood, picked up the Captain's hat and handed it to him, smiling. "You know what they say, Captain. You can take the crop duster out of the country—but don't put him in a P-40.

Daryl landed and taxied his plane over to join the others, shutting down the engine before he'd stopped rolling. He slid back the cockpit cover and raked the leather helmet off his head, his chestnut hair popping up, full and youthful, his teeth movie-star luminous as he grinned at his friends. He'd unbuckled the seatbelt and was halfway out of the cockpit when he looked around and said "Where's Rick?"

Abraham, nicknamed red because of his bright hair, tipped his head toward the sky, where Rick's plane was climbing in a slow, deliberate spiral, up and up.

"I said get down here, Grimes!" the Training Captain barked into the radio. But he was answered by a burst of static and the suspiciously garbled words, "…-Can't hear you. Repeat?"

Daryl swore beneath his breath and bounced back into his seat; he was starting to refasten his harness when the T.C. snapped, "You're down, Dixon! That's an order!"

"What about him?" Daryl asked, climbing out and following the spiral of Rick's plane, up and up.

"He's not taking my orders anymore," the T.C. said, almost to himself.

Daryl was about to ask him what the hell he meant by that, when he noticed Rick leveling off and setting the plane into a firm and engine-steadying speed, like a rider gathering a horse before a dangerous jump. "He's gonna do it," Daryl said.

"Do what?" Glenn wondered.

"It." Rick's plane was a speck above them, and for a moment it seemed to pause in the air.

"What it?" Glenn asked, with Abraham and Martinez frowning the same question at Daryl.

"The outside loop." For years it had been the holy grail of aviation, a stunt attempted by test pilots and barnstormers alike, leaving splattered remains incinerated in burning fuel. It had been first achieved but a few years before—by the very Colonel Jimmy Doolittle who now commanded this airbase. Since then others had tried it. A few had succeeded. The other's had died. In a normal or inside loop, the pilot simply pulled back on the control stick and let the nose of the plane rise until the whole aircraft fell over like a kid doing a backflip off a boat dock. The plane's momentum and inherent aerodynamics made the maneuver feel natural and almost self-correcting; it had been done for decades, and was a commonplace. The outside loop was another story. Once a pilot pushed a plane into its maximum dive and then tried to complete a circle with the cockpit on the outside rather than the inside of the loop, he could not see the ground rushing up and had to trust his life to his instincts and skill at a time when everything worked against him; it was death or glory, with no-in-between.

"Oh no," the T.C. said. "Oh no. Oh no…"

Martinez and Glenn joined in, chanting with him, as they felt their insides congeal like cold piss around their hearts. "Oh no. Oh no. Oh no…"

Rick, in his cockpit, took a deep slow breath and found that place within himself where he had learned to go in times of stress and danger; it was very near that inner place he had always gone to when he felt isolated, scorned for being different, persecuted for his errors in the classroom, the same spot he'd withdrawn to when Shane Walsh had held up his paper for ridicule. This place of calm and commitment had pain nearby, and anger, and determination, as well as a dragon's breath of fear, blasting like a blow torch, and when at the center of his spirit Rick could draw the energy from the emotions, but they did not pollute the purity of his instincts or the clarity of his goals. _Do it_ were the only words involved in the experience, and they were subliminal, like the echo of a dream, rather than a sound in his mind. Once he'd made the choice to do something—and he had envisioned what he was about to do, long before this moment—his body began to move without his mind needing to send it verbal instructions. As now… when his left hand moved to the throttles and pushed them steadily forward, as his right hand shifted the stick toward the nose and the horizon rose and the earth loomed before him.

Power dive.

The P-40 screamed toward the ground, hurtling down under full power, he was going faster than the plane was designed to go, and an orchestra of physical forces began to vibrate and then shake the plane. The buffeting could slow him down, but he needed every shred of speed possible; he backed the throttles just enough to ease the shuddering of his fuselage, and kept dropping, faster and faster.

Down on the ground, Daryl whispered like a prayer, "You can do it, Rick. You can do it."

The P-40, hurtling toward the ground at nauseating speed, snapped into a half roll, streaking upside down over the runway. Rick, experiencing more g-forces than the human body was designed to take, hung inverted in his harness, the asphalt of the runway shooting past, ten feet beyond his head. None of the men on the runway had ever seen any object travel that fast before. Bullets were swifter, but those you couldn't see; the P-4 was a screaming flash of engine and wind.

Rick pushed the plane into a climb, his cockpit on the outside of the circle, and it shot skyward again, propelled by its enormous speed. But it quickly slowed; the propeller-driven planes rapidly lost the battle with gravity when moving vertically. Daryl and his friends watched without breath or noticeable heartbeat as the plane reached the top of its arc and almost stalled; if it lost enough airspeed, all of the mystical lifting power of moving air would be gone and it would drop to the earth without control, like the hunk of lifeless metal it truly was.

Like it truly was… if not in the hands of a pilot. Rick feathered the throttles and nosed the plane over towards the earth again.

Only this time, he had very little altitude. And that was the whole problem with the outside loop. Inside loops, with the pilot pulling the plane's nose up and swinging it naturally back over the tail, were easy and had been done for years; the plane was designed for lift in that direction and the pilot could see where he was going. Thee outside loop seemed against nature; it suggested the Icarus of Greek mythology, so drunk with the thrill of flying that he flew too high and destroyed himself.

To Daryl, to Glenn, Abraham and Martinez, to the Training Captain and the squadron's other pilots on the ground, it seemed Rick didn't have enough altitude to make it. His plane had almost stopped dead at the top of the arc; he'd milked the upward speed to its absolute limit, to get every inch of altitude possible but still, he was so low!

The truth be told, it seemed that way to Rick too. That quiet place within himself, the place of facing danger, was not completely silent now; it vibrated with the sucking feeling of a voice about to scream, and a sudden chill bit his insides.

But he was going. He pushed the throttles to their limit.

He could not just ram forward his other controls, and expect to survive. To live, he had to gather speed and pick exactly the right instant—if such an instant existed in the physics of wind lift and air density on that particular day—to make the planes controls convert velocity into turning power.

The plane raced down, still with its belly on the inside of the curve…

And made it full circle, with barely a foot to spare. Rick's head in the inverted aircraft raced above the asphalt runway so close it seemed as if he could've touched it if he'd opened the canopy.

His friends—all except Daryl and the Training Captain—burst into cheers. Rick, in his cockpit, permitted himself to smile.

The hearts of those on the runway were still thumping in their chests as Rick's P-40 touched down and rolled toward them. The squadron pilots ran out to meet him; the Training Captain just stood there shaking his head.

Daryl got to the plane first, jumping onto the wing as Rick came to a full stop and slid back his canopy. Daryl grabbed him by the harness and shook Rick so hard that his body banged around in the seat.

"You coulda killed yourself, you stupid bastard!" Daryl shouted. Then he dived into the cockpit, hugging Rick, Daryl's feet in the air as the other pilots crowded in yelling congratulations. Daryl said into Rick's ear, "That was the most beautiful thing I ever saw."


	3. Chapter 3

Colonel Jimmy Doolittle was one of those men who, in his mid-forties, was even tougher than he had been in his twenties.

There was no way to prove this, of course; he could not go back in and take on the younger version of himself on in a bar fight, but Doolittle had sometimes imagined this very thing, and he was pretty sure the older version of himself—though possessing aches and pains and stiffness and the absolute physical resilience he had known in his youth—still could've prevailed, on will alone. And experience, of course. When he was a young hotshot pilot, he was bursting with that brash bravery necessary to fly a fighter plane.

But the other kinds of courage, like the will to preserve in the maddening world of military bureaucracy, the determination to see things through to the end and make them come out right for the Army he loved and the men he both served and commanded—those kinds of courage he had developed later.

But still, from time to time, he pondered that fantasy question of just how tough he would have to be now to dominate his younger self. He thought about it because he trained young pilots, and he knew he could never do his job right unless he believed—and they believed too—that he was still better than they were.

Making them believe this had never seemed to be a problem, however. Every cadet he ever saw revered him. They snapped their spines to rigidity when in his presence; most of those he called into his office, even those brought in for commendation actually trembled.

Doolittle liked the respect, the rigid spines. He did not like the trembling. But he was damned sure standing at attention.

Doolittle sat at his desk, watching him.

"There are some people," Doolittle said, in a slow voice that was meant to sound ominous, "who think the outside loop is reckless and irresponsible."

"How could it be irresponsible, Sir," Grimes began, with the Georgia accent that had softened a good deal since he'd been living with the mix of men in the Army, "if you were the first man in the world to do it?"

"Don't get smart with me, son."

"Never, Sir. I just meant it's dangerous only for the kind of pilot who wants to show off, rather than inspire the other pilots in his unit. And after all you've done for me, Sir, working out the transfer, I did it to say thanks. To honor you, Sir. What the French call a 'homage.'"

"That's bullshit, son. But it's really good bullshit."

"Thank you, Sir."

"I've thrown a lot of men out of my outfits, Grimes, but never had one volunteer to leave." Doolittle paused and pondered that fact for a moment, and Rick stood there wondering if he finally pushed things too far, as everyone had seemed to be telling him that he was going to throughout his life. Doolittle stared out the window before looking back at him and going on, "But I've never seen America so determined to sit on its hands while all of Europe's at war, either. When Air Commander Fenton told me the Brits were creating the Eagle Squadron to give American volunteers a chance to help them fight the Germans, I had two thoughts: a lot of Americans are going to die… and I wish I could go back myself."

Doolittle stood, moved around his desk, and shook Rick's hand. "I admire your courage, Grimes," he said. "Good luck over there."

In the barracks, where Rick's squadron slept, his buddies were getting slicked up for a night on the town. Daryl stood at the mirrors above the sinks hung onto the latrine wall and splashed Old Spice into his palm, smacked it onto his face and neck, and admired his reflection.

It was not himself he was so proud of. He took pride in what he had already done in his life, and what it had taken to do it; but Daryl was not the kind of man to stand back and adore himself.

But he knew the power of symbols, he felt what they meant. And there was no symbol in his life greater than the uniform he wore. It was one of equality, and one of merit. Rich men's sons, even in America, might still be able to use the power of wealth to wrangle cushy positions in the Army, but no one could buy those pilot's wings. The men around him, they had earned their wings—as Daryl had earned his—and Daryl respected them all, even if their skills may lack what some others had. They had fulfilled requirements that were unforgiving, and they lived in a profession that sent its failures as well as many of its successors to the grave. Daryl loved the substance of their commitment to this profession. And as for his own skills, he would accept the superiority of no one, even Rick. To Daryl, now—as it had been throughout his life—an edge that anyone held over him was only temporary. Daryl was climbing, learning, improving, and he would never stop. He had truly become, already, an officer and a gentleman.

To Daryl's right stood Martinez and Glenn, combing Vitalis through their hair. Glenn was the softest and gentlest guy in the unit with the most boyish face. He seemed to care about everybody and to care what they thought of him, and since everyone liked him, he was perpetually happy. That Martinez, with his New York edge and attitude, would accept him—not just as a buddy—but as a best friend gave Glenn an almost giddy love of life. Enthusiasm brimmed from him as he checked himself in the mirror and burst out, "You good lookin' sumbitch… don't you ever die!"

"That's your line for the night, ya know," Martinez said, patting his hair with the middle joints of his fingers, as if his combing job was too perfect to help in any other way.

"What? Good lookin' sumbitch?" Glenn wondered.

"No numbnuts, die. You get your nurse alone, you look her in the eye, and you say, 'Baby, they're training me for war, and I don't know what'll happen. But if I die tomorrow, I wanna know that we lived all we could tonight.' I've never known it to fail."

Abraham, on the other side of Daryl, finished brushing his teeth and spat into the sink. Abraham had a stutter when he was excited or nervous, even with his friends. Tonight his stutter was especially pronounced. "He's n-never known it to w-work, either," Abraham said.

Laughing and shoving each other, they moved to the door of the barracks, toward the night beyond and the base bus into Manhattan, and the nurses they would be meeting there. As they stepped out the door, they ran into Rick stepping in. "There you are!" Daryl said. "I thought I was gonna have to miss the nurses, and you know how disappointed they woulda been."

Rick smiled, but there was something clouded in his eyes. Daryl thought Doolittle must have dealt him some harsh discipline and tried to add an optimistic light to Rick's perspective by adding, "So Doolittle didn't kill you! Attaboy!" He threw his arms around Rick's shoulder and started to walk with him toward the buses. But Rick patted Daryl on the back, in a paternal way Daryl had never felt from his own father but had sometimes felt from Rick's dad. "Daryl, there's something I gotta tell ya."

"Yeah? ..."

But Rick didn't want to say it right there among the other guys. "Ya'll go ahead," he told them. "We'll catch up."

So, as the others move toward the bus, Daryl and Rick lagged back, and moved to a patch of ground at the edge of the parking lot, beneath a dim street light. It was a mild night as New Jersey winters go; the ground was not frozen, but it was grassless and hard, swept clean by winds and policed of every cigarette butt and scrap of paper, as the ground on Army bases always was. It was a bare place for a heart-to-heart talk—and from Rick's demeanor—Daryl already knew that's what they were about to have.

The guys in the bus were excited. Their training was almost over, and rumors had started weeks before about where they would be sent next. Most of them had traveled little in their short lifetimes; there was not a man among them who had been any further from home as a civilian than the Army had already sent them in their various training postings on their way to becoming pilots, so almost any possibility for the future sounded like an adventure—as long as there were women. Being cooped up with one other young guys pulsing testosterone just sharpened their appetites for the fairer sex, and previous evenings on the town had already taught them that leather flight jackets, silk scarves, and pilot wings were a potential aphrodisiac. Nurses weren't as easily impressed as civilian girls were, but that was just part of the night's challenge, and the pilots were anxious to get on with it.

"Let's go!" Martinez shouted to the bus driver.

"We've gotta wait for Daryl and Rick," Glenn said.

"Wh-what are they doing?" Abraham wondered.

All three looked toward Rick and Daryl, at the edge of darkness. They seemed to be arguing about something. Daryl had taken a step back, and was rubbing his palm into his chin, like he didn't know whether to shout or to fight. Glenn, Abraham, and Martinez had seen them argue before; they did it like brothers. But this looked different, like something was really… wrong.

"How could you do this?" Daryl was saying.

"The Colonel helped me work it out."

"I don't mean how'd you do the paperwork. I mean, how the hell did you do it without letting me in on it?"

"I'm sorry Daryl, but they're only accepting the best pilots." Rick offered him a smile, but it wasn't his best one, the one that just popped onto his face and made you celebrate with him. This one was the kind of smile a kid wore when taken to a tent revival.

"Don't make this a joke, Rick. You're talking about war, and I know what war does to people. It's people dying. And it's the wrong people, the ones who don't profit. I read somewhere that war is a farmer's son from Kansas trying to kill a factory worker's son from Berlin, with neither of them knowing why."

"Maybe if I coulda read that, I'd be smart enough not to volunteer."

"Dammit, Rick—" Daryl tried to hold his emotions back; but they just built up and boiled over. "It's no joke, and it's no game! It's war—where the losers die, and there aren't any winners, just guys who turn into broken down wrecks like my father."

"I know that's how you feel, and that's why you should stay. But I feel different. I feel like it's my duty to go."

"Don't preach to me about duty! I wear the same uniform you do! If trouble wants me, I'm ready—but why go look for it?"

"Because it's looking for me."

Dammit! Daryl thought to himself, for a guy who thinks himself, for a guy who thinks of himself as inarticulate, Rick always hits you right in the heart. Daryl stood there simmering, trying to come up with something to say; and once again, Rick beat him to it.

"I know you're right Daryl. War's not fun, it's not a game like it was back when we were boys. We're men now—and we live in a world where somebody strong is hurting somebody who's weak. And never in my life have I been able to stand by and watch that happen."

And now Daryl stopped simmering and just stood there in the flat, true silence that Rick always brought him to, sooner or later.

From the window of the bus, they heard Glenn holler, "The nurses are waiting!" The driver added punctuation with the sharp whoosh of his airbrakes releasing.

Daryl didn't move. "Let's go," Rick said.

"Some other time. I don't feel like a party."

Rick could find no words to keep Daryl from walking away. Rick just stood there on the bare ground beneath the street lamp and watched him stride off into the darkness, and as angry and as hurt as he knew Daryl was, Rick never doubted for a moment that he would get over it. There was nothing in the world that could break the bond between them.

Over at the bus, Abraham was holding the driver around the neck with one arm and honking the horn with the other. Rick glanced back at Daryl once more, and wished he could stay with him and drink a beer and talk.

But Rick had someone else to see that night.

Abraham honked the horn again, and Rick turned and ran for the bus, hopping into its door just as it began to move.

 **AN: So the story has been starting off kinda slow with lots of background and whatnot, but it'll be getting good here very shortly because we meet Ms. Greene in the next chapter. Unfortunately, I won't be able to post until Thursday, but I will most definitely be posting more. I hope you enjoy and leave lots of feedback. Share this story with friends too. Much love!**


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